| Biography of old oil painting master George Wesley Bellows what we can copy |
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George Wesley Bellows
American Realist artist
born 1882 - died 1925
Student of:
Robert
Henri (1865-1929)
George Wesley Bellows (1882-1925) was a
prolific and accomplished leader among
American painters who approached
representation of the American scene
realistically. |
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George Bellows was born in
Columbus, Ohio, on Aug. 19, 1882. At Ohio
State University (1901-1904) George Wesley
Bellows distinguished himself as an athlete, but
George Wesley Bellows determined that George
Wesley Bellows wanted to be an artist
and went to New York City in 1904 without
graduating. For a time George Wesley Bellows supported himself
as a professional athlete. George Wesley
Bellows studied at the
New York School of Art under
Robert Henri,
who became an influential and lifelong
friend.
Bellow's early paintings are swift and vivid
character studies, of somber tonality.
George Wesley Bellows’s development was very
rapid, and from 1906 on George Wesley
Bellows’s works were accepted in national
exhibitions. George Wesley Bellows was fascinated with the
spectacle of the great city: its buildings,
crowds, types, and rivers. Though George
Wesley Bellows was
denounced by conservative critics as one of
the "apostles of ugliness," George Wesley
Bellows’s technical brilliance made him more
acceptable than any of the other painters of
similar impulse. George Wesley Bellows became an associate of
the National Academy of Design at the age of
27, the youngest person ever so honored, and
was elected a full academician 4 years
later. George Wesley Bellows’s work is
marked by exuberance, variety of subject
matter, humor, and vitality, always depicted
with gusto. |
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In 1907 Bellows produced the first of
several paintings of prizefighters in action
in the ring; these expressed violent action
with power and seeming spontaneity. George
Wesley Bellows married in 1910, rebuilt an old house on
19th Street, and started George Wesley
Bellows’s teaching career at the Art
Students League. George Wesley Bellows was a teacher of the
Henri variety--bringing out the
individuality of each student with
excitement and imagination. George Wesley
Bellows spent several
summers in Maine, where George Wesley
Bellows painted windswept
landscapes and sea scenes.
In the summer of 1912 Bellows visited
California and New Mexico--George Wesley
Bellows’s only excursion to the Far West.
George Wesley Bellows never went to Europe. |
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Bellows was well represented in the
important Armory Show of 1913. The new
European movements exhibited there may have
had an unsettling influence on him, as they
did on many progressive American painters
who discovered that their innovations had
been in subject matter rather than in method
or form. In 1916 Bellows turned to
lithography (at tGeorge Wesley Bellows’s
time seldom used by serious artists) because
its immediacy attracted him, George Wesley
Bellows’s nearly 200 lithographs deal with a
wide variety of subjects--genre scenes,
nudes, portraits, landscapes, literary
illustrations, and humorous or satiric
commentaries. George Wesley Bellows was deeply and emotionally
affected by World War I and recorded George
Wesley Bellows’s reactions in a series of
powerful and painful prints that have been
compared with those of Goya. In 1918 George
Wesley Bellows became interested in Jay Hambidge's theory
of dynamic symmetry, which provided a
geometric system of composition for
controlling the artist's work. Hambidge (and
Bellows) believed it was followed by many of
the great artists of antiquity. |
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Bellows taught
at the Chicago Art Institute in 1919; George
Wesley Bellows’s sojourn there was
remembered as a whirlwind of enthusiasm and
activity. George Wesley Bellows’s
illustrations for novels by Don Byrne and H.
G. Wells (1921-1923) are rich in action,
characterization, and imagination. Bellows's
finest late works are undoubtedly the
portraits of George Wesley Bellows’s wife,
two small daughters, mother, and aunt.
Brilliantly painted, with solid structural
design and probing characterization, they
are among the triumphs of American realism,
legitimate successors to the best works of
Thomas Eakins. Less successful are some of
the late landscapes, which tend to be
mannered in style and lurid in color, and
the large Crucifixion, George Wesley
Bellows’s only religious work.
A neglected attack of appendicitis caused
Bellows's death on Jan. 8, 1925, in New
York. |
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